FIG. 1 shows the diagram of a prior art distributed access point deployment, such as a sports stadium. Many wireless users may congregate in the stadium, and enhance their sport viewing experience using portable wireless devices which include a WLAN capability. In the prior art, a plurality of access points AP1 102, AP2 104, AP3 106, AP4 108, AP5 110, AP6 112, AP7 114, AP8 116 are placed around the perimeter of the stadium, or in any manner which provides adequate WLAN coverage over the stadium. FIG. 2 shows the prior art utilization of a segment of the wireless spectrum, and a common division is channel 1 208 which contains 64 or 128 subcarriers of OFDM modulation data, and channel 6 210 and channel 11 212 are similarly configured. WLAN communications systems which operate according to IEEE standard 802.11b or 802.11g operate with each station (STA) associated with a particular access point (AP), such that a plurality of stations may use an access point which is operative in CH1, a different plurality of stations may use an access point which is operative in CH6, and yet another plurality of stations may use an access point operative in CH 11. Under the IEEE 802.11a and 802.11g WLAN standards, the simultaneous transmission by an access point and station is known as a collision, and the associated AP and STA will re-transmit the packet when the recipient of the corrupted packet fails to acknowledge receipt by detecting the missing sequence number of the corrupted packet in the received packet stream. When two access points attempt to equally share a channel such as CH1, a likelihood exists that both access points will transmit at the same instant in time, which will result in superposition of the subcarriers from each and the receiving STA will simply see a corrupted OFDM symbol. For this reason, the access points operate in separate channels, such as an example shown in FIG. 1, where configuration of the access points AP1 through AP8 is done to maximize the distance between two access points using the same channel, such as AP1 102 and AP5 110. In the prior art, a station such as STA1 can select a strongest AP such as AP1 102 without concern for residual interference from distant AP5 110 which is operative on the same channel.
A problem occurs where a large plurality of users 120 are located in a single access point region, and this problem is exacerbated when all of these users have a large amount of data to transmit or receive. In this case, the particular channel CH1 is shared by a large number of users who overwhelm the capacity of the channel, and quality of service to all users in that particular quadrant is degraded. It is desired to provide an improved quality of service for a cluster of high density WLAN users.